One of the more mysterious characters from President Obama's 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father is the so-called 'New York girlfriend.' Obama never referred to her by name, or even by psuedonym, but he describes her appearance, her voice, and her mannerisms in specific detail.

But Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the 'New York girlfriend' was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago.

"During an interview in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description in his memoir was a “compression” of girlfriends, including one who followed Genevieve [Cook] when he lived in Chicago," Maraniss writes in his new biography, an excerpt of which was published online today by Vanity Fair.

"In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend," Maraniss writes, offering a passage from the book in which they go to see a play by a black playwright:

One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.

"None of this happened with Genevieve," Maraniss writes. "She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright. When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them. So that was a consideration. I thought that [the anecdote involving the reaction of a white girlfriend to the angry black play] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends. And so, that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all … so that was an example of sort of editorially how do I figure that out?”"

Broadway Books, a division of Random House's Crown Publishing Group, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I think Obama is a compression or composite of an American Marxist liberals that needs to go back to private life.

Odysseus

05-02-2012, 05:05 PM

I have always thought that someone else ghost wrote that book for him.

Bill Ayers publicly admitted that he ghosted it.

Elspeth

05-02-2012, 05:08 PM

Bill Ayers publicly admitted that he ghosted it.

Really? When?

Janice

05-02-2012, 05:13 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfIZDYm0a54

Really? When?

This goes back to at least 2008 that Im aware of.

Bill Ayers ghost wrote Dreams from My Father (http://www.google.com/search?q=Bill+Ayers+ghost+wrote+Dreams+from+My+Fat her&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a)

MORE (http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/did_bill_ayers_write_1.htm)

Odysseus

05-02-2012, 05:26 PM

Now that I think of it, most teenage boys have composite girlfriends before they start dating. Mine was a composite of the girls from Three's Company, Charlie's Angels and whoever happened to be the Playmate of the Month at the time.

DumbAss Tanker

05-02-2012, 05:44 PM

I.e., it was bullshit, just like the "Constitutional scholar" bullshit and all the other bullshit.

Gina

05-02-2012, 05:58 PM

Oprah is going to be pissed. She interviewed him (like that other author) and she bought it all. Maybe she'll start doing her show again so she can yell at him.

yeah right

Elspeth

05-02-2012, 05:59 PM

This goes back to at least 2008 that Im aware of.

Bill Ayers ghost wrote Dreams from My Father (http://www.google.com/search?q=Bill+Ayers+ghost+wrote+Dreams+from+My+Fat her&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a)

MORE (http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/did_bill_ayers_write_1.htm)

First, thank you. There's a lot here.

At first I thought Ayers was joking in the video, and even the Salon article leaves a lot of doubt. But to keep joking about something like that makes no sense, unless other bloggers found out first. Then Ayers has to address it.

Now, who is Jack Cashill? If what he says is right, there is a lot more than just a book at stake here. His piece, The Mansourian Candidate, links Obama with not only Ayers but with Edward Said, Khalid al-Mansour, Tony Rezko, and the Nation of Islam. This is an odd circle of people.

Elspeth

05-02-2012, 06:19 PM

Oh, here is a link to a CSPAN video of Jack Cashill talking about Obama and the book:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/298382-1

OK. Here is the book that actually has 6 pages on Bill Ayers' help to Obama on the book:

Thanks for the Cashill video link Elspeth. Great, great video. Loved the line: "We know less about Barack Obamas early life than we know about George Washington."

Elspeth

05-02-2012, 07:47 PM

Thanks for the Cashill video link Elspeth. Great, great video. Loved the line: "We know less about Barack Obamas early life than we know about George Washington."

I know!

If you listen further on in the video, you'll hear that the "girlfriend" in the OP of this thread is actually William Ayers importing his own girlfriend (who died making a bomb) as well as her familial estate into Obama's life.

BTW, what is it with these RICH kids getting involved in bomb making crap? Ayers was also wealthy.

Odysseus

05-03-2012, 01:13 PM

I know!

If you listen further on in the video, you'll hear that the "girlfriend" in the OP of this thread is actually William Ayers importing his own girlfriend (who died making a bomb) as well as her familial estate into Obama's life.

BTW, what is it with these RICH kids getting involved in bomb making crap? Ayers was also wealthy.

Poor kids can't afford C-4 and bomb-making classes on Ivy League campuses. The go to college in order to prepare for jobs.

Novaheart

05-03-2012, 03:51 PM

Bill Ayers publicly admitted that he ghosted it.

Which president do you think actually wrote his book? Seriously, who do you think writes all these books by politicians and radio hosts?

Starbuck

05-03-2012, 04:38 PM

Which president do you think actually wrote his book? Seriously, who do you think writes all these books by politicians and radio hosts?
I believe all presidents who claimed to have written their own book have done so. Except Obama, and in that case I have evidence that he did not write it.

If I saw evidence that some president other than Obama was taking credit for a book they had not written then I could take your "seriously......", seriously. :lemo:

Odysseus

05-03-2012, 07:01 PM

Which president do you think actually wrote his book? Seriously, who do you think writes all these books by politicians and radio hosts?

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and most of the first presidents were authors. Jefferson wrote the first book on parliamentary procedures in the Americas. Grant wrote his memoirs. Teddy Roosevelt was a prolific author. Eisenhower wrote Crusade in Europe in 1948 and Nixon wrote Six Crises in 1962. Truman wasn't an author, but he was a prolific reader who was fond of Thucydides, and read him in the original Greek.

Novaheart

05-03-2012, 09:21 PM

I have always thought that someone else ghost wrote that book for him.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and most of the first presidents were authors. Jefferson wrote the first book on parliamentary procedures in the Americas. Grant wrote his memoirs. Teddy Roosevelt was a prolific author. Eisenhower wrote Crusade in Europe in 1948 and Nixon wrote Six Crises in 1962. Truman wasn't an author, but he was a prolific reader who was fond of Thucydides, and read him in the original Greek.

This is why I love you.:smile-new:

Novaheart

05-03-2012, 09:25 PM

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and most of the first presidents were authors. Jefferson wrote the first book on parliamentary procedures in the Americas. Grant wrote his memoirs. Teddy Roosevelt was a prolific author. Eisenhower wrote Crusade in Europe in 1948 and Nixon wrote Six Crises in 1962. Truman wasn't an author, but he was a prolific reader who was fond of Thucydides, and read him in the original Greek.

Eisenhower, who was a superior writer himself, leaned nevertheless on several helpers including Edward Mead Earle, an historian who labored on Ike's first book, Crusade in Europe (1948), a memoir of the conquest of Nazi Germany. As chief executive, Eisenhower relied on a team, as all recent presidents have done. His included particularly Emmet John Hughes of Life magazine, and C. D. Jackson, a former editor of Time. Eisenhower's Farewell Address in January 1961 contained his memorable warning against the corrosive influence of the "military-industrial complex." The text was substantially the work of Malcolm C. Moos, a political scientist and newspaper editor, and a friend of Eisenhower's brother, Milton, then president of Johns Hopkins University. Theodore Sorensen, a Nebraska-born lawyer, was the principal author of some of President Kennedy's best speeches including his distinguished inaugural address. Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage (1955), which earned him a Pulitzer Prize and was so influential in helping enlarge his reputation on the eve of his campaign for the presidency, was the product of skillful ghostwriting by Sorenson and others.

He does come up with some interesting information from time to time, however this wasn't one of those times. Clearly the context of the question he was allegedly addressing was more recent, and not having to do with authors who became politicians, rather politicians who became authors. Clearly his attempt at sleight of hand worked on at least one person, you.

Sure they do. In the publishing industry, they have specific meanings and pay differently. A ghostwriter actually produces the creative produce. An editor compiles the creative work of others and/or deals with elements of grammar and style, but is supposed to leave the core of the writing intact. (A bad editor can severely overstep, but that's not really the job.) A contributor is someone who is not a primary author but supplies some amount of creative product. A consultant can mean different things, but those duties are usually set out in the contract.

Also it good form and good ethics to credit the writer who actually takes your life story and writes the creative product:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/FaithOfMyFathers.jpg

Elspeth

05-03-2012, 09:53 PM

He does come up with some interesting information from time to time, however this wasn't one of those times. Clearly the context of the question he was allegedly addressing was more recent, and not having to do with authors who became politicians, rather politicians who became authors. Clearly his attempt at sleight of hand worked on at least one person, you.

Here were your questions:

Which president do you think actually wrote his book? Seriously, who do you think writes all these books by politicians and radio hosts?

While the second question was in present tense and referred to the current day, the first question was in the past tense and could refer to any time in history. Ody answered your first question, not the second.

Now if you meant question #1 to refer to present day, you needed to state that or put in a present tense verb. Otherwise, past tense means past tense, except in your mind, Nova. Now, Ody is a smart guy, but I don't think he counts reading minds as one of his many skills.

You, Nova, have a consistent rhetorical issue: you think juxtaposition of certain questions equals absolute connection on all counts: temporal, ideological, etc. It does not. You and I have had this little discussion before, and you have only been able to spew out insults because that's your schtick.

It's a game you play: ask a series of questions that are not, on the surface, connected. Then, when someone answers one question out of the series, accuse them of being evasive or stupid because they have not connected all the questions as they are "connected" in your mind. Then, you take that as a win and a chance to be pissy with people.

It's entirely predictable, and, as such, getting a little boring. However, I will continue to point this out every time.

Retread

05-03-2012, 10:00 PM

...................

It's entirely predictable, and, as such, getting a little boring. However, I will continue to point this out every time.

And many of us thank you for doing so.

Novaheart

05-03-2012, 10:06 PM

Sure they do. In the publishing industry, they have specific meanings and pay differently. A ghostwriter actually produces the creative produce. An editor compiles the creative work of others and/or deals with elements of grammar and style, but is supposed to leave the core of the writing intact. (A bad editor can severely overstep, but that's not really the job.) A contributor is someone who is not a primary author but supplies some amount of creative product. A consultant can mean different things, but those duties are usually set out in the contract.

Also it good form and good ethics to credit the writer who actually takes your life story and writes the creative product:

The words I listed do not have a concrete meaning. A ghostwriter or an editor can be responsible for varying degrees of the finished product.

Who built the Trump Tower?

Retread

05-03-2012, 10:09 PM

The words I listed do not have a concrete meaning. .........

Never worked in publishing have you?

Odysseus

05-03-2012, 10:09 PM

Eisenhower, who was a superior writer himself, leaned nevertheless on several helpers including Edward Mead Earle, an historian who labored on Ike's first book, Crusade in Europe (1948), a memoir of the conquest of Nazi Germany. As chief executive, Eisenhower relied on a team, as all recent presidents have done. His included particularly Emmet John Hughes of Life magazine, and C. D. Jackson, a former editor of Time. Eisenhower's Farewell Address in January 1961 contained his memorable warning against the corrosive influence of the "military-industrial complex." The text was substantially the work of Malcolm C. Moos, a political scientist and newspaper editor, and a friend of Eisenhower's brother, Milton, then president of Johns Hopkins University. Theodore Sorensen, a Nebraska-born lawyer, was the principal author of some of President Kennedy's best speeches including his distinguished inaugural address. Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage (1955), which earned him a Pulitzer Prize and was so influential in helping enlarge his reputation on the eve of his campaign for the presidency, was the product of skillful ghostwriting by Sorenson and others.

Read more: Presidential ghost writers - A History of the Presidency - war, election, foreign http://www.presidentprofiles.com/General-Information/A-History-of-the-Presidency-Presidential-ghost-writers.html#b#ixzz1tr8YMlcC
I didn't cite Kennedy for that reason.

He does come up with some interesting information from time to time, however this wasn't one of those times. Clearly the context of the question he was allegedly addressing was more recent, and not having to do with authors who became politicians, rather politicians who became authors. Clearly his attempt at sleight of hand worked on at least one person, you.
Nixon wrote Six Crises between being Vice President and President. Teddy Roosevelt wrote throughout his life, before, during and after his presidency, but he was also a politician, just not president. Grant wrote his memoirs after his presidency. The founders were from a generation where a gentleman was expected to contribute to the letters of the day, and Washington, Madison, Jefferson, even Adams, did so.

Here were your questions:

While the second question was in present tense and referred to the current day, the first question was in the past tense and could refer to any time in history. Ody answered your first question, not the second.

Now if you meant question #1 to refer to present day, you needed to state that or put in a present tense verb. Otherwise, past tense means past tense, except in your mind, Nova. Now, Ody is a smart guy, but I don't think he counts reading minds as one of his many skills.

You, Nova, have a consistent rhetorical issue: you think juxtaposition of certain questions equals absolute connection on all counts: temporal, ideological, etc. It does not. You and I have had this little discussion before, and you have only been able to spew out insults because that's your schtick.

It's a game you play: ask a series of questions that are not, on the surface, connected. Then, when someone answers one question out of the series, accuse them of being evasive or stupid because they have not connected all the questions as they are "connected" in your mind. Then, you take that as a win and a chance to be pissy with people.

It's entirely predictable, and, as such, getting a little boring. However, I will continue to point this out every time.

:love_heart:

Novaheart

05-03-2012, 10:15 PM

I believe all presidents who claimed to have written their own book have done so. Except Obama, and in that case I have evidence that he did not write it.

If I saw evidence that some president other than Obama was taking credit for a book they had not written then I could take your "seriously......", seriously. :lemo:

One way to see this is in the fact that it's almost impossible to define what a ghostwriter is. Ulysses S. Grant, whose "Memoirs" is often cited as the best presidential book, relied on a small army of aides — not only Mark Twain, who edited and published the book, but also a number of now anonymous researchers and assistants. Modern political authors typically add a ghostwriter or two to this mix.

But even there, things can get slippery, with some politicians writing the first draft, others writing or dictating specific passages, and others simply supplying the raw materials. (This is one reason "ghostwriting" remains a sexy but misleading term: It imposes uniformity on what is really a broad range of relationships.)

Every political book, in other words, involves a degree of collaboration. But so does every book, period. This should be easier to see today, when many works are less weighty, well-reasoned tomes than multimedia launching platforms. And yet you can always find someone, usually a professional writer, willing to bash ghostwriting. These critics may start by pointing out how nice it is when politicians write their own books (and I agree, when the politician can write a good book). But their attacks quickly turn visceral. And ghostwriting quickly turns into a symbol of our political and cultural decline.

While the second question was in present tense and referred to the current day, the first question was in the past tense and could refer to any time in history. Ody answered your first question, not the second.

Now if you meant question #1 to refer to present day, you needed to state that or put in a present tense verb. Otherwise, past tense means past tense, except in your mind, Nova. Now, Ody is a smart guy, but I don't think he counts reading minds as one of his many skills.

You, Nova, have a consistent rhetorical issue: you think juxtaposition of certain questions equals absolute connection on all counts: temporal, ideological, etc. It does not. You and I have had this little discussion before, and you have only been able to spew out insults because that's your schtick.

It's a game you play: ask a series of questions that are not, on the surface, connected. Then, when someone answers one question out of the series, accuse them of being evasive or stupid because they have not connected all the questions as they are "connected" in your mind. Then, you take that as a win and a chance to be pissy with people.

It's entirely predictable, and, as such, getting a little boring. However, I will continue to point this out every time.

A paragraph (from the Greek paragraphos, "to write beside" or "written beside") is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences.[1][2] The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented. At various times, the beginning of a paragraph has been indicated by the pilcrow: ¶.

Retread

05-03-2012, 10:23 PM

ghost writer:
A professional writer who writes for another person and who does not get a byline or credit for his or her writing.

Elspeth

05-03-2012, 10:30 PM

A paragraph (from the Greek paragraphos, "to write beside" or "written beside") is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences.[1][2] The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented. At various times, the beginning of a paragraph has been indicated by the pilcrow: ¶.

I guess a non-sequitur is better than no sequitur at all. :friendly_wink:

Elspeth

05-03-2012, 10:31 PM

ghost writer:
A professional writer who writes for another person and who does not get a byline or credit for his or her writing.

I assume they just get a flat fee, too.

Starbuck

05-03-2012, 10:40 PM

......Ulysses S. Grant, whose "Memoirs" is often cited as the best presidential book, relied on a small army of aides ...........

Very good. The question is: Was Grant open from the beginning or did he say or imply that he, himself had done the work? 'Cause if Useless went around telling people he had written the book, when in fact he had not, then he would be the same blowhard that I suspect Obama is.

Now. There you've gone and made me to it. I've ended a sentence with a preposition. And ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.:adoration:

Retread

05-03-2012, 11:11 PM

I assume they just get a flat fee, too.

Some actually have reputations that give them a cut

txradioguy

05-04-2012, 08:27 AM

A paragraph (from the Greek paragraphos, "to write beside" or "written beside") is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences.[1][2] The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented. At various times, the beginning of a paragraph has been indicated by the pilcrow: ¶.

One way to see this is in the fact that it's almost impossible to define what a ghostwriter is. Ulysses S. Grant, whose "Memoirs" is often cited as the best presidential book, relied on a small army of aides — not only Mark Twain, who edited and published the book, but also a number of now anonymous researchers and assistants. Modern political authors typically add a ghostwriter or two to this mix.

Editing and research are legitimate functions for aides to a writer, and does not detract from the authorship of the material. OTOH, in the case of Dreams of My Father, Obama, after two years of not producing anything after receiving the advance, apparently gave all of his research materials to Ayers and a few months later a book miraculously appeared.

But even there, things can get slippery, with some politicians writing the first draft, others writing or dictating specific passages, and others simply supplying the raw materials. (This is one reason "ghostwriting" remains a sexy but misleading term: It imposes uniformity on what is really a broad range of relationships.)

Every political book, in other words, involves a degree of collaboration. But so does every book, period. This should be easier to see today, when many works are less weighty, well-reasoned tomes than multimedia launching platforms. And yet you can always find someone, usually a professional writer, willing to bash ghostwriting. These critics may start by pointing out how nice it is when politicians write their own books (and I agree, when the politician can write a good book). But their attacks quickly turn visceral. And ghostwriting quickly turns into a symbol of our political and cultural decline.

Ghostwriting does not, on its own, demonstrate political and cultural decline, but the quality of the ghostwritten material does. Can anyone imagine Grant putting his name on some of the vaccuous crap that's been produced lately?

Not everybody has a book in them, especially politicians and captains of industry, which is why ghost-writing is a big business. I have a buddy, a professional writer, who ghosted a novel for a celebrity several years back. He wrote the whole thing and the celeb gave it a once over, put his name on it and cashed in.

A paragraph (from the Greek paragraphos, "to write beside" or "written beside") is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences.[1][2] The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented. At various times, the beginning of a paragraph has been indicated by the pilcrow: ¶.

I guess a non-sequitur is better than no sequitur at all. :friendly_wink:
Oooh, Latin trumps Greek. Well done. :evil-grin:

Very good. The question is: Was Grant open from the beginning or did he say or imply that he, himself had done the work? 'Cause if Useless went around telling people he had written the book, when in fact he had not, then he would be the same blowhard that I suspect Obama is.

Now. There you've gone and made me to it. I've ended a sentence with a preposition. And ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.:adoration:

Grant died shortly after completing his memoirs. He wrote them to pay off debts and provide for his family, but they were published posthumously by Twain.

While there is a general consensus that Twain did the final editing and may have even polished some of Grant's prose, the memoirs are stylistically different from Twain's work. Twain himself wrote about it, saying:

This is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put them into something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall stand, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts."

Twain wouldn't have said that about something that he, himself, had written.